Good evening!
Good evening, good evening.
Give me some more organizing.
Good evening.
Okay I know y'all can do better than that.
Good evening.
Good street in the house tonight.
They just moved, she's from Texas but came back
from Los Angeles after 25 years back
in Texas, chair of the committee for us.
So then we did it again and we had First Lady
Xan Holmes, Mrs. Holmes and First Lady Mrs.
Holmes to speak.
Tongues. Tongues.
From the new dictionary of thoughts, this
Japanese proverb.
The tongue is but three inches long, yet it can
kill a man six feet high.
Get home as quickly as possible, my sister instructed.
And I know my mother waited until I got there.
The horror of the heart in this manner has no words.
To sit beside your mother and see her hands
tied to keep her from pulling out the tubes.
And she wants to make, to me, to take them out.
And the doctor tells me not to.
I hear someone's voice saying, you know, if you
do, you're in a lot of trouble.
How do you talk to someone you love so deeply
who won't open their eyes and look at you,
won't smile?
And what do you say?
I search for words, for conversation, and hear
my voice ask a question that I've held onto for
way too long.
Mother, where did we come from? Do you know?
I didn't know my grandmother would die giving
birth to the child after my mother.
Mother was raised by her grandmother, Eliza, a
difficult, closed woman who, it appears, ran
moonshine for a living.
Some years ago I had come across a book that
had pictures of the way Haitian people fixed
their yards.
A tree in the front with all the other plants
encircling it.
And that's the way our front yard looked in Mississippi.
Mother, are we from Haiti?
Do you know where we're from?
And she heard me.
Her face, its entire countenance changed right
before my eyes.
And she spoke to me in a language I couldn't identify.
It wasn't any of the languages I was familiar with.
This was an African tongue.
To this day I don't know what she said, and
even though it sent me into a state of absolute shock,
I thought it really rich for her to go back to
her roots before she crossed over.
The experience redefined for me the term mother tongue.
The West African cultural leader, Maladoma
Patrisome, spoke little English when he arrived
in the United States to teach.
He tells us...
One of my greatest problems was that the things
I talk about here did not happen in English.
They happened in a language that has a very
different mindset about reality.
I find myself trying to ferry meanings from one
language to another, from one reality to another,
a process that denaturalizes and confuses.
From ship to auction lot to plantation, there
must have been in the ruthlessness of the first
American colonies
a terrible and a terrifying silence among the Africans,
thrown together speaking different tongues and
having to learn the new speech while under the lash.
For many of us, English is not our mother
tongue, our ancestral tongue.
When you wrestle with language that is not your
own, you learn to give honor to silence.
Yes, the tongue is the blood relative of silence.
We speak of entering silence because when you
come out of it, you know exactly what you need
to do.
That is, if you're really hearing.
So there is also this marriage of language and hearing.
When I first began to work with the great
theater artist Frank Silvera, he gave me a
process of learning my script.
There are no lines.
Now, I'm standing there holding the lines.
They're in something called a script, and I
know I have to memorize all of them before I
step in front of an audience
and hear this man saying, there are no lines.
When you explore the words that this character
says, then you will discover what was happening
when the words were born.
Words like people are born.
And they are born in experience.
If you can't uncover the experience that made
the word, then the word's going to come out of
your mouth right.
What you're talking to will hear and understand
exactly what you are saying because they will
hear the experience.
Have you ever been on a train and you're going
around a curve and you look back and you can
see the end of a train?
That's the process I'm talking about here.
It's possible for me to go far enough forward
to look back.
And then it doesn't matter if my mother is
speaking in tongues, I grasp the experience.
Now, that's how it was with my father.
He was pastor of St. Mark Freewill Baptist
Church in a small area of Vicksburg,
Mississippi called Jonestown.
But he was really a poet.
Now, he's going to take a text, and the lines
from the text will go such and such.
Then there's going to be a subject that we're
going to talk about from that text.
And it was never what he was going to talk
about, but what we were going to talk about.
So we felt very included in this process of language.
He begins, and the first line of his speech
comes right out of that subject.
And he has this deep, rich, baritone voice that
just sings the lines, and the lines are put
together just so.
You'd think you were hearing some Shakespearean poet.
It is once more, once more and again.
Once more and again that I, your humble
servant, knee-bent and body bowed to Mother Earth.
And who knew I would just be turned on by that
song and rhythm?
Oh, in the flight from the tongue to the ear,
the redundancy, once more and again.
And while I bowed, let it be, for no form or
fashion, neither nor outside showed to this
unfriendly world.
Dig the double negative.
Our youngsters today catch Hell for using
double negatives, but very few teachers stop to
study the roots.
There are many languages in the world in which
the double negative is not a problem.
It is a given.
It says what needs to be said, and both the
speaker and the hearer are in sync.
Oh, we're out of sync with language because
we've lost the picture behind the words.
The picture really came first, you know.
The African knows that. That's why they drew
the image on the walls.
When you open your eyes, that's the thing you see.
So where did this concept of, in the beginning
was the word, come from?
And how did we lose our times?
What I hear from most artists today puts us
through some hard times.
Our singers used to not lie to us.
They used to tell you the naked truth, the way
it's going down, you know.
Nina Simone.
And it opens you.
Oscar Brown Jr.
And it's soul.
Bessie Smith.
Oh, may fuck the batters.
The singers said what they wanted to say
without spitting.
Oh, may was fat today.
Appropriating for themselves.
Some kind of freedom, you know.
Oh, may fuck all the batters.
Oh, may was fat today.
He was doing the thing you asked him.
In the name of the U.S.A..
Mr. Rich Man, Rich Man.
Open up your heart and mind.
Would you do that for me?
Mr. Rich Man, Rich Man.
Open up your heart and mind.
So much of the artistic and especially the
literary aspect of our struggle for freedom has
been under the domination and control of white people.
My life is a fiction.
Where are Negroes from?
They made them up.
So we are blessed when we come upon the artist
who has the courage and enough spiritual power
to write this naked, raisin truth.
A little economic power doesn't hurt either.
That's right.
James Baldwin was one of those persons.
And Toni Morrison is one of those persons.
Playwright Alice Childress.
And Margaret Walker, who said we must stand
this ground and gave us an anthem for my people.
Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of
final clinch be the pulsing in our spirits and
our blood.
Let a race of men now rise and take control.
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.
Taras denied me a passport because my poetry
frightens them.
If they bolt the doors against me, I come like
light through windows.
Carlos Castaneda, who writes profoundly about silence.
The Nigerian novelist and playwright Amos
Tutuola, who speaks of the incarnations of the
soul and what it is to love ghosts.
And Langston Hughes, who wrote some poems my
mind relishes.
I wonder where his head was the day he wrote that.
These artists can put words in my mouth because
they already know what needs to be said and
have the courage to give it birth.
We hear them.
Oh yeah, we hear them.
The word is not the thing.
The experience.
Is the thing.
When language has moments like that for the
rest of history, it will be part of somebody's awakening.
Somebody remembering.
Somebody opening up.
You can, as they say, find your tongue. Word.
From the dictionary of words, facts, and
phrases, according to the 17th century English
writer John Dryden, wit is in the remembrance
and the rebalance of idea, but must give both
delight and surprise.
Where there is no surprise, there is no wit.
Wit is a knowing without instruction or learning.
Wit was used in my home more than any other
word in relation to intellect.
When I was growing up as a child, a child that
had mother wit was regarded as rich.
Everyone expected them to make special
contributions to the community.
Mother wit is the instinctive knowing of a situation.
There is another definition of wit that refers
to pleasure. Amusement. To intellectual.
But the wit closest to home for me is to know.
My mother was shocked in the Valley department
store in Vicksburg, knowing that they were not
going to let her try on the clothes.
Such were the rules of segregation, you know.
But she would go in there, and when she found a
dress she liked, she'd turn it inside out.
My mother would.
Just to see how it was made.
And then she'd go home and get some newspaper,
make a pattern, and make that dress.
You have to get up early in the morning, honey,
to stop a woman who wants to do something.
And as the old folks used to say, has her wits
about her.
Now one day I asked her, I said, how did you
learn to sew, Mama?
And this woman who gave me her name, you, said,
I don't know.
I just look at something I know I can make.
And I said, sorry, but you should be studying
these folks.
These bodies that know I can do that, that know it.
And the dictionary which sends me to humor.
The humor that most applies to life is not
comedy or laughter, no.
But the humor that defines the condition of the
human temple and of the four fluids,
the cardinal fluid, that reflect one's physical
or mental condition, when you're in a bad mood
or displaying a bad temper,
you're said to be out of humor.
Now, isn't that interesting?
It's less interesting.
When you're operating at your prime, you're
able to outwit a situation.
Find a way to win despite the greatest odds.
Such is the mastery of black people.
And my mother was one of the masters.
She was president of the PTA at the high school.
Of course, the school was segregated.
The superintendent of the school was white.
All the directors at the board of education
were white.
You know how it was.
And the bigwigs wanted to see our graduation exercise.
And when they came, they had to have seats in
the front row by themselves.
So my mother ropes off this little section for
them where they can be safe.
As they're leaving, congratulating us and
trying hard not to pat us on the head,
my mother says to them, we want to see how you
all do it.
So we're going to come over to your graduation
next week.
Just rope off a little section for us.
And we did.
And they did.
Oh, we have outwitted slave masters, bounty hunters,
who Cluck's clan patrols poverty and pain, as
well as lesser evils like bill collectors.
People laughed at us without any reason as if
they were amused that we were really human beings.
I often see this happen in theater as well.
When Lillian Hellman's Little Foxes was mounted
at the Lincoln Center in 1967,
I played Addie, the maid.
And there's a scene where the butler, Cal, and
Addie are preparing for important visitors.
The mistress of the house, Miss Brigitte, wants
to use the wine that she's been saving for such
an occasion.
Well, so we're in the dining room getting the
best glasses ready.
And there's the excited chatter. Cal is to open
the wine and I'm to clean the glasses.
During rehearsal, director Mike Nicholas says
to me,
Mia, Mia, this should be a funny scene. Can you
make it funny?
Well, I don't know anything that's funny about
drying off glasses and pouring wine.
So I assume he means that we are supposed to be
funny, that we are to be the brunt of the joke.
Can you give me until tomorrow to find out what
the joke is? I'll bring it in tomorrow.
Good, good, great.
And I go home to work on it.
The one thing I know immediately is that this
joke is not going to be on me.
At rehearsal the next day, just before Miss
Brigitte enters the room, I lift her glass to
my lips.
And I sip, I sip out of it.
Then I hand the glass to the butler, inviting
him to join me.
The actor played by Andre Womble is looking at
me as if to say, have you lost yours?
I mean, he is absolutely calatonic.
Then just as the missus come in, I wipe the
glass off and I hand it to her.
Mike Nicholas says,
Mia, if you do that, they won't like the character.
Why, they don't like me anyway. But this man
ain't no wife.
Well, Mike lets me keep it in and the curtain
goes up.
And when Miss Regina brings that glass up to
her mouth,
that folk in the audience is rolling it down.
Because Miss Regina, they know. They know.
Dictionaries define the face of wit as wise.
But I think it's short for wit, witness,
clairvoyance, to see.
And in that scene we can choose to be wise in
humor or out of humor.
Day after day my mother would tell my father,
now you've got to do something about that roof.
And he'd forget to put it and put it off.
But my mother's sense of humor ain't right.
When the rain began to leak in, she simply got
an umbrella
and went about her work in the house underneath it.
Not a pan to catch any water, not a dropper,
and not a word.
An umbrella.
The next day the roof was fixed.
Look for places to use your wit and wit to make
your coming
as a human being with an experience and a life,
a feeling and a heart and an agenda.
Look for places.
There were no mirrors in my nanny's house. No
mirrors in my nanny's house.
And the beauty that I saw in everything, the
beauty in everything
was in her eyes. Was in her eyes.
There was no mirrors in my nanny's house. No
mirrors in my eyes.
No mirrors in my eyes.
In ancient times, mirrors were made of metal.
Those of the Jewish women of brass. Mirrors of
silver were introduced by
practicing tallies in 328 B.C.. And that's from
Haydn, a dictionary of dates.
There were no mirrors in my nanny's house.
Is this the baby?
Yeah, this is the baby.
Oh, it's such a pretty little thing. Just look
at it.
I tell you, I used to feel like I was the most
magnificent thing there ever was.
Do you know that she can iron a shirt and cook?
She can make cornbread.
Oh, well, you just go on. You know that child, Kevin.
She can make cornbread.
When I was so encouraged, I could do it all.
I really didn't know then how exceptional my
parents were.
In my home, we never had any concept of beauty
other than behavior.
Pretty is as pretty goes.
So there was no space to see myself as being
unacceptable until I went out of the home to school.
There, each day, I was taunted as being ugly,
dark skinned, which is a double ugly, with
short nappy hair.
Now, in Mississippi, some 70 years beyond
slavery, that was the low point on the pole,
especially the nappy hair.
And I had pimples. Oh, I would just pick, pick,
pick at them until I just see to be a sea of blockage.
I tell you, it was not a British sight.
My mother used to say, let yourself alone. Just
let yourself alone.
Because no matter how much the condition
cleared, it continued.
One day, when I was working on the character of
Sister Margaret in the Amien Corner, I had
reason to look up the word let.
There was some little habit, the character
habit, reminded me of what I used to do,
constantly pulling at myself.
So I could hear my mother's voice, let yourself alone.
So I looked up the word.
Somewhere in the definition of let was the word approve.
And I realized that despite my family's
encouragement, I didn't approve of myself.
I didn't approve of me. Never had. And I was
unable to shed that sense of shame, a sense
derived from slavery and what we continue to go
through and the outrage of it all.
Shame what I saw in others' eyes when they
looked for beauty and saw me.
Have you ever looked in a mirror and seen two images?
There was a point at the joining of the
mirror's edge where you can actually see
yourself reflected as two images.
One is the conditioned you. The other is the
unconditioned you.
The mirror speaks to illusion, and illusion is
connected to identity.
If you think of your body as yourself, then
what it is is your body.
And the self is a universal thing.
Not too long ago, I had a dream.
Sister, I dreamt I was a baby.
And I was holding a baby.
I was holding me in my arms.
And the baby said, I am Igbo.
I am Igbo.
I wish I could have heard this when I was
around 20 or 21.
I am holding myself.
And I am Igbo.
What a blessing it would have been there.
I think it would have been the beginning of my
search for identity.
It is a question of identity that one must answer.
You are as you were created.
You are God. And it's the same for everyone.
Your parents try to teach you that.
So you step out, but your heart is still
jumping in your body.
You're still scared. You're still picking at yourself.
In Western society, we are allowed to grow up conflicted,
thinking of ourselves as two.
Too small, too large, too dark, too lumpy, too old,
but surrounded by offerings that will fix the problem
which was never a problem in the first place.
What a terrible, terrible price we pay to alter
the lens
of how we appear to others.
Supporting a multi-billion dollar industry that
will bleach,
Curl, look, slice these bodies into something acceptable.
But what is perfection at the moment will be
changed by time.
One of my first Broadway plays was The Miracle Worker
with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke and that
tall, beautiful southern woman
who played Helen Keller.
Anne and Patricia had to wear these stiff corsets.
They were all drawn up and lace-tight and
swollen up at the top
and pushed up at the bottom and just really miserable.
I stood backstage watching them and I realized
that women
some generations back had just taken off those corsets.
A whole new civilization would have happened.
The Chinese spiritual philosopher Wei Wuwei
asked the question,
why are you unhappy?
And his answer is, because 99% of everything
you think of
and everything you do is for self.
And there isn't one.
When I read this I put that book down and he
didn't pick it up again for five years.
But when I did return to Wei, he started me on
the path
to another description of the world other than
the Judeo-Christian one
that I had been taught, and that is the human
being in a state of perfection.
So to be human is to experience perfection.
You are complete and you are perfect.
I find that concept to be very liberating.
Very much like the bumper sticker that says I
was born okay to curse.
There is that in you that is the same in everybody.
The key then is to differentiate between the
body and the self.
Sometimes I identify with the eye of the flesh
instead of the eye of the spirit.
And every time I identify with the flesh, I suffer.
Every time I identify with the spirit, I soar.
Right through the shoe, my bare feet kiss the
winter's cold.
My father made souls, my father made souls.
Made souls from a pasteboard box, souls to
break a mother's heart.
My father made souls, my father made souls.
This little piggy toe was going here.
My daddy would sing to me.
And this little piggy toe was going there.
While he traced my foot so tenderly.
My father made souls, my father made souls.
I didn't notice his voice was flat like wheat.
Or the tears falling held the skelter down
mama's tree.
I only heard his happy song.
Had his love to keep me warm.
My father made souls, my father made souls.
My father made souls. (applause)
From the dream-symbol Dictionary. Door.
An opportunity for self-discovery.
If closed, examine the fear or block that is
limiting you from going forward.
If open, walk through. Doors.
Stage doors.
Jim Crow doors.
Class doors.
Mass doors.
Where did I put my keys?
In college, my challenge was the door of learning.
The key was perception.
And my perception was that I had no idea what
they were talking about.
In the American education system, they give you answers.
They don't give you process.
I mean, they tell you the answer.
But they don't know what the question really
should be.
So you're sent in a direction where no truth
can come to you.
I wanted to write what I was feeling.
Take ideas out of boxes and examine them.
They wanted me to feed them something that
affirmed their sense of the other sense of
order in the world.
Now, hair is a door.
Revolutions began with hair.
From that woman in the Bible, Delilah, who cut
her lover's hair almost growing.
Look what Castro did with his hair.
Created a symbol for the Cuban Revolution.
Now, I'm going to shave until we get free down here.
I'm going to shave until we get free down here.
So when we got to the place where we let our
hair go.
When we started braiding and dreading and
picking it out, just let it be what it wanted
to be.
And the unrest around us just vibrated.
Can't you wear your hair like that?
Hair is a revolutionary signal because it has
to do with power.
Theater can be a door if it's hungry.
In 1948, I was working at the Old Globe in San
Diego just beginning to learn what theater is
all about.
And just coming to understand that unlocking
this actress door is a problem.
Because if it means reshaping myself to fit,
reshaping my selfness to fit the image that
opens that door,
then I'm not going to make it.
So it became, and it remains still, a matter of
finding the key without annihilation of the soul.
Get your eagle!
It was in 1948 that the Progressive Party
caught my attention when I began reading
The California Eagle!
A weekly and the oldest black newspaper in
The Eagle newspaper, Honey.
On the West Coast.
Later I was become friends with the paper's
publisher and editor, Charlotte Bass,
the first black woman to run for vice president
of the United States.
Charlotte's public support of the Progressive
Party makes them interesting to me.
I tell you, they are saying such wonderful things.
Promoting black and white unity, wanting to
build a bridge between the races.
And they're not calling me a negro.
They used to turn black.
I mean, well, I embraced the entire idea with
such absolute enthusiasm that I decided to help
them raise some money.
So the very first play I ever write is for the
Progressive Party in San Diego.
And I go from door to door.
Yes, those doors too.
Raising and for the production money.
The play is called All's Well That Ends.
And I mean, everything was in this way like
kitchen sink.
Well, when you've been silent for 300 years and
you finally get a chance to say something, you
say it all.
Well, the media critics have a field day.
And their remarks give me the good grace to
tear up the script right after the production.
The external experience is gratifying.
We sell out, raise some money, and we have fun.
And the audience has a good time too.
But the inner experience with these stories is
always traumatic.
Even among the so-called progressive thinkers,
I encountered the seven deadly sins and other distractions.
I would go to their parties and almost every
black man there was with a white woman.
I think there was some kind of policy or something.
One evening I was on a bus.
A young white woman got on the bus and made a
point of not sitting by me.
Well, being from Mississippi, I'm quite used to that.
As it happened, we both got off at the same
stop and walked in the same direction.
We entered the same building, and all the time
she's looking over her shoulder like she thinks
I'm going to rape her.
So I zip around her, determined to go on about
my business.
As I'm about to ring the doorbell, there she is.
Turns out we're going to the same radical
political meeting.
You see what I mean?
On the other side of that door we want to get
through so urgently.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of the door that
is the ultimate equality of human beings before
the law and before law.
Who's got the key?
These thoughts are just swirling and swirling
in my head, in my mind,
until I've moved to challenge white women to do
something with white supremacy.
And I know I can do this with my heart.
So I write this poem, A Black Woman Speaks of
White Womanhood, White Supremacy, and Peace.
Anything that's going to help people understand
each other better is going to open a door, a window,
so you can at least look in, look in a bank or something.
The American Women for Peace is co-sponsoring
this huge gathering,
the American People's Peace Congress in Chicago.
And they're offering a cash prize for the best
peace poem submitted.
Since I'm just about penniless, I send them
this poem.
In the meantime, a member of the Civil Rights
Congress hears me do the poem
and invites me to Chicago to perform it for the
Peace Congress.
Now this is a door.
I'm living in Los Angeles, so it's arranged for
me to travel by car to Chicago with a Jewish
couple and their children.
When we reach Salt Lake City, Utah, there's a problem.
And I'm it.
The hotel has a policy against housing Negroes.
So the Jewish wife tells him, without
consulting me, that I'm her maid.
Let me tell you the time we got to Chicago.
There are 500 women attending the Women's
Workshop at the Congress that afternoon.
And I begin.
It is right that I, a woman, black, should
speak of white womanhood.
My husbands, my fathers, my brothers, my sons,
die for it.
And their blood chilled in electric chairs,
stopped by the Hangman's noose,
hooked by the Lich moth's rope,
stilled by white supremacists' desire to kill
for profit, gives me that right.
In one of those moments that is beyond coincidence,
five black women are seated on the stage as
special guests.
Each is a lynch quill.
Their men, husbands, brothers, or sons were
lynched by rope or by Jews.
We are women all.
And what wrongs me murders me, eventually marks
your grave.
So we share a mutual death at the hand of tyranny.
When I finish my poem, hundreds of women stand
up screaming at the top of their lungs.
People come from running from all parts of the
world because they think somebody was being attacked.
What happened?
The women are screaming and weeping and hugging
each other.
What's going on? What's wrong?
A woman right here. Huh?
The women agreed that I should read it again
and again for the full conference that evening.
The inevitable Paul Robeson gives some of his
time on the program.
Too neat.
Well, I've never faced an audience of 5,000
people before.
But I know why I'm here.
It's 1951.
The House of American Committees is still going strong
and progressives are walking the thin line
between a scream and a whisper.
People are being jailed for speaking, for
affiliating with, for thinking,
for being red, pink, right or left, right or wrong.
It doesn't seem to matter.
My dear friend William Patterson, head of the
Civil Rights Congress,
is in jail for refusing to hand over to the
government the names of persons his
organization has assisted.
Two of the leaders of the Council of African
Affairs, Alpheus Hutton and W.E.B. DuBois,
are both on their way to jail.
The government has seized Golson's passport.
And the American Legion in Chicago actually
tried to stop the city from giving us a license
for this Peace Congress.
Under these circumstances, when someone tells
you, you can't say this now, you can't say this here,
then you've got to say it.
If a door is open, walk through it. Hey!
My ornaments were the whip-lashes star.
My diamond, perhaps a tear.
Instead of the paint and powder on my face, I
wore a solid mask.
A fear to see my blood so spilled.
And you women, seeing, spoke no protest.
It is no mistake that your naked bodies on the
calendars announce the fatal dates.
This is the depravity they would reduce you to.
Death for me.
And worse than death for you.
White supremacy is your enemy and mine.
So remind me not of my slavery.
I know it well.
But rather tell me of your own.
Just one man walks out.
When I finish, people follow their feet.
The American Women for Peace makes copies of a
black woman speak and hand it out to everyone.
Excuse me.
But that's not what my copy said.
You know in the fifties the word black with a
capital V just sent everybody into stress in
all directions,
so without my permission they changed the word
black to negro and published the poem as a
negro woman.
And on the cover there's a drawing of two women.
The white woman has her mouth open.
And the black woman, I guess that's me, is listening.
You can't imagine the rage I feel.
The rage coming from the recognition of where
we are in the spectrum of human dignity.
The woman who invited me to the conference
makes them collect all the copies that's been distributed.
Then we make a little bonfire right there in
the hall and burn these negro rocks.
The hot July day is nothing compared to the
heat in this bonfire,
because those standing with me are people who
are really beginning to assess where they are,
where we are, and why we're here.
Later American Women for Peace reprinted the
poem with my type.
And that's when I knew what art can do if you
use it properly.
Art is a door.
And the key, look what Louis Armstrong did with
his home.
They called him the ambassador.
And we can't ever forget the majestic Marian Anderson.
Before religion there was art.
In fact, people used to say Thou art, meaning
you art.
You are a work of art.
And that makes you the key.
Think about that now.
The next time you're running around in a tizzy
hollering, where are my keys?
Opposites from Solas, a dictionary of symbols.
In the Hindu doctrine of Maya, the world of
phenomena, opposites cancel each other out.
One opposite being balanced by another through
the alternation of creation and destruction.
Don't go there with me.
Or you hear people say, I'm not going there
with you.
And you think, what place is this?
Or perhaps you know.
Don't go to anger with me.
Don't go to a rough place with me.
Don't go there.
Go someplace else.
An opposite place.
And then we'll be okay.
What's wrong? Nothing.
But you hear something else.
How are you feeling?
Oh, I'm just fine.
And she's just been beaten by her husband.
No, I'm all right.
If angry is what you feel, then give yourself
permission to feel angry.
Don't let them see you cry. Cry!
Go to exactly what you're feeling, and it turns
to its opposite immediately.
When you have permission to do something, you
no longer need to do it. Hey!
I was in rehearsal in New York for James
Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charlie,
when another Baldwin play, The Amen Corner, was
being staged in Los Angeles.
The director, Frank Silvera, was having trouble
finding someone to do the lead role of Sister Margaret.
Baldwin offered that I could go to Los Angeles
just for two weeks to open the play,
then return to Blues.
Now, this is an arrangement.
There's some kind of arrangement for theater.
It's a strange arrangement.
But Baldwin didn't have any confidence in Amen Corner.
He thought it would all be over in two weeks.
We ran for more than a year before heading to Broadway.
So I arrive in Los Angeles and walk into the
Robeson Playhouse,
a tiny theater with Silvera's apartment right
above it.
The man welcomes me and tells me the play opens
in six days.
I wait for a smile across his face.
You know, some sign that he's joking.
And when it doesn't come, I'm thinking,
the character of Sister Margaret is on stage
about 90% of the play,
so this man is out of his mind.
You know, Via, this is not our language,
so we really don't know where it goes or if it
makes a circle.
So we're going to work on the unity of opposites.
And what is that?
You think that this thing is here and that
thing is there,
and then between shall meet.
But it's a circle.
It's like a line.
One side is this, the other side is that.
It's like making a circle with your hands.
The right hand completes the left hand,
and that's what makes the circle possible.
Every word has its opposite, and its opposite
completes it.
And that's the way we're going to do this play.
When Silvera showed me,
you know, all my lines for Sister Margaret in a
few days,
I was very, very frightened.
And I didn't know who was crazier, Frank with
his unity of opposites
or me for letting him put me in this position.
But I allowed myself to experience what he was
talking about.
I went on as scheduled and didn't miss a single line.
The lines were there in an organic way,
like they weren't just lines someone wrote,
but what some human being could live.
We tend to think of opposites as something
contending against something else.
On this side, it looks like this, and on that
side, it looks like that.
But it's really the same thing going round and
round and round.
Everything is moving, spiraling out, expanding.
You see this in the Yin-Yang circle.
The nature of one is exclusive.
The nature of a circle is inclusive.
So the circle we create with the characters in
the theater
is the same as we do in life.
If there's sadness in the scene and you start
off being sad,
then you have no place to go.
So you put on another face, you laugh, you
dance, and then it catches you.
Once I got the hang of this in theater,
I found myself thinking I am happier on stage
doing a character
than I have ever been offstage as myself.
So I really didn't know who I was or how I
operated as a human being.
This realization forced me to face the
challenge of bringing this process
and its joy into my moment-to-moment life.
This is not something for the stage.
It's something for a human being.
Anger is a cover for grief sometimes, but
usually it's a cover for fear.
Fear that something is being taken from you.
Fear that you won't meet someone else's demands
or expectations.
Fear of being unrecognized.
Fear for your very survival.
And what is fear's opposite?
Courage. You can have courage and still be afraid.
You can go on even though you are scared out of
your wits.
Nowhere was this more apparent to me than
during the Civil Rights Movement
when, as a freelance journalist,
I traveled through parts of Alabama and
Mississippi in the mid-1960s.
The voter registration movement, with its
accompanying violence, was in high gear.
I saw people confronting violent faces and dogs
with fangs bare,
yet there was no visible sign of fear.
They said it felt more like triumph than fear.
Like, I've got the best part of you, even
though you're beaten.
I especially remember a Reverend Jesse Crane in
Greenwood, Mississippi.
SNCC SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, was organizing there.
And at that time, Mississippi's population was
half black.
But only 5% of them were registered to vote.
The lowest rate in the United States.
We shall not, we shall not be moved.
Just like a dream that's standing by the water.
We shall not be moved.
Now remember, for a Negro to try to vote in the
South was to sign his or her own death warrant.
If they weren't murdered, they lived under the
threat of death.
They were fired from their jobs, refused seed
and supplies for planting.
Their homes were burned to the ground.
The women raped.
Fingers that signed the registration form were
cut off.
They had every reason to no fear.
We shall not, we shall not be moved.
Just like a dream that's standing by the water.
We shall not be moved.
Reverend Crane, the share proper of his wife
and three of his 14 children,
had registered to vote for the first time in
their lives. Courage.
In retaliation, the white farmer who owned the
land where Crane had sharecropped for 13 years,
he addicted the family.
No tears here.
He asked me to take my name off.
Crane explained calmly when I interviewed him.
I'll die first.
I've been wanting to register all my life, but
I didn't have the courage.
Now I've got somebody to help me.
I'm happy letting you know I'm out of the house.
Now I got me a real home.
By uniting fear with courage, Reverend Crane
gained a freedom so deeply urgent
that he could welcome a camp on the side of the
road as his own.
The opposite of love is not hate.
The opposite of love is indifference.
Indifference is a state of being in which you
can take photos of people being beaten
or tortured and not make a move to stop it.
And watch a man be lynched and turn the event
into a picnic.
Indifference is the enemy.
You understand the enemy. You don't expect love there.
In nature, there's something scientists call
the black hole where there's no light.
I mean, the light is in there, but it can't get out.
And that's what I think hate is.
It's love, but it's so deep in there you can't
get to it because you've got so much
information power on it.
So hate is love trying to get out. Hey!
We can see that the unity of Opposites completes.
Look at your body. Left brain, right brain.
Look at the balance here.
Reverend, look at what our great mother created.
Inside and out there are two.
See, two making one a unit.
Death in one form is rebirth in another form.
And this is life in perfect balance.
We put the ashes into the ground, and now they
return as turnip leaves. Yeah.
Redress. For Webster's New World Dictionary, to
redress is to set right, rectify, or remedy,
often by making compensation for a wrong or grievance.
To redress the balance or the scales to see
that justice is done.
Dear Negro sisters everywhere in the United
States, join us in this sojourn for truth and justice.
If your life has any unction, you will feel the
pain of oppressed human beings, a wounded community,
and you will feel called to act.
You may think the call comes from a television
image or personal crisis,
but actually it comes at you through your brain
and goes right to your heart.
Responding to that call is not, as you may
already know, particularly convenient.
It tends to claim your attention right when you
are in the middle of something much more fun.
That's why for most of us, our sojourns into
truth-seeking are temporary visits.
In 1951, before the Freedom Rides and the voter
registration movement capitalized the words
civil rights,
about a dozen black women answered the call.
We became the solejourners for truth and justice,
compelled to take our grievances to the
People's Congress for redress.
Not protest, redress.
Redress speaks to remedy, it speaks to setting
right or wrong, redressing the scales.
A protest is usually thought of as an action
taken against something,
but the words Latin-based is protestare, coming
forth to affirm, and testare meaning to witness.
So protest is an opportunity to object, but
also to affirm.
The problem I have with protest is that it
doesn't seem to get you out of the situation.
It keeps you doing the same thing over and over again.
I mean, thirty-two blacks were lynched during
the ten years we issued this call.
How do you protest that?
The incidence of carnage against African Americans,
where the victim often becomes the accused,
where justice does not prevail, had a spin.
It drained the energy of the community.
Yet we had no choice but to rally to each
cause, to keep on keeping on.
So even though much of the civil rights
movement was described in terms of protest,
it's really the wrong word, because we were
seeking redress.
Civil antitoxics, specific remedies.
Rectify this.
My sister solejourners included activist Angie Dickinson,
journalist Shirley Graham, new bride of W.E.B.
Du Bois, playwright Alice Childress,
Paul Routt Robeson's wife, Eslanda Robeson,
Charlotte Bass, editor of the California Eagle,
actress and director, Frances Williams,
Dorothy Hunton, whose husband, Alpius, worked
with Robeson and Du Bois on the Council of
African Affairs,
activist Louise Patterson, who had organized an
earlier march to Washington in support of the
imprisoned Scottsboro Boys,
and the lynched widows who had been at the
Peace Congress four months ago.
We set up operation in Harlem at the Harriet
Tubman Center on Liberty Avenue.
While we were gathering our meager resources
and strategizing,
we learned that a group of white women
activists were also planning a trip to Washington,
and had more or less decided that they would
speak for us.
Now their presumption set us on fire.
Within just ten days, evoking the spirits of
Sojourner Truth and the Harriet Tubman call,
we issued a call to join us in this sojourn for
truth and justice.
As acting secretary for the initiating committee,
I had the dubious honor of writing the letter
to President Harry as Truth,
requesting an audience at the White House on
Monday, October 1st, 1951, to discuss...
Full redress of our grievances.
The same was asked of Alexander Pace, Secretary
of Defense, the Attorney General, and numerous Congressmen.
Well, when we arrived in the Capitol and
immediately discovered that the Confederate
flag is being sold right in Washington's Union Station...
the reception from our people in Washington is
quite encouraging.
And once the black cab drivers learned why we
were there, they refused to take our money.
Hey, now!
A labor unit in Washington loaned us their office.
We had no idea how many women would show up.
We set up on crime night, and we waited.
Sonora B. Lawson came from Virginia. The
Reverend Mother Lena Stokes from New York.
Mrs. Ollie Jones, active in PTA, came from Chicago.
Josephine Grayson, wife of one of Martinville
Seven, came from Virginia,
just a few months after her husband and six
other tobacco and furniture workers were
legally lynched by the court.
Rosalie McGee came from Mississippi, four
months after her husband was executed for
allegedly raping a white woman.
Mrs. Westry came, still grieving.
Her son was shot on an emergency operating
table by a policeman while doctors were trying
to treat him.
Pauline Taylor came from Youngstown, Ohio.
She lost a nephew to the Korean War, but after
she attended a peace meeting in Poland,
our government confiscated her passport.
Bessie Mitchell came from Trenton, New Jersey.
Her brother was in jail, one of the Trenton Six,
afraid for the murder of a white store owner
despite absolute evidence of their innocence.
Well, Mrs. Evelyn Broussel, a federal worker,
came saying she'd rather be jobless than to
sacrifice the right to fight for her people.
Amy Miller had been sitting in her car in
Georgia with her husband.
They came and shot him while she watched.
Killed him because he had voted.
Then they burned the family's house to the ground.
But she came with less than two weeks notice.
A student from Sarah Lawrence College, a
domestic worker from North Carolina, a union
organizer from Chicago.
The right of Lorraine Hansberry.
Oh, they came.
One hundred thirty-two women responded in
person, coming from fifteen states.
Our slogan?
Dry your tears and speak your mind.
Dry your tears!